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AFTERWORD “No Home Like a Raft” repositioning the narratives of u.s. religious history Thomas A. Tweed “I never felt easy till the raft was . . . out in the middle of the Mississippi,” the narrator of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn says as he and the escaped slave traveling with him set out on their aquatic journey. After Jim and Huck hung up their “signal lantern” and let the currents carry them, they felt “powerful glad to get away.” “We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery.”1 For those characters in the novel by Mark Twain, who grew up on the river where he later piloted boats, being on the raft was exhilarating because it put distance between them and the immorality, hypocrisy, and suffering on the “sivilized” shore.2 Readers of this collection of historical essays are “powerful glad” for other reasons. The contributors to this book—a rather different mode of transport —also tell their stories from the Mississippi, following the currents from its source in northern Minnesota to its destination in the Gulf of Mexico. This aquatic vantage allows for more expansive vistas. By contrast, the usual historical surveys, which have been set in the woodlands and cityscapes farther east, “do seem so cramped up and smothery.” Yet positioned along the Mississippi River more characters enter the complex plot as the settings shift, moving up and down the major artery dividing the terrain that came to be called the United States. Taken together, in other words, the essays move us toward richer narratives. We might just leave it at that and conclude, as Huck does at the end of his fictional journey, “there ain’t nothing more to write about, 206 | Thomas A. Tweed and I am rotten glad of it.”3 Postponing our delight, however, it might help to write just a little more—about where these essays have taken us and where we might go next. So where are we as we reach the end of this book? Michael Pasquier says that he and his collaborators hope the book will contribute “to the ongoing conversation about how historians tell stories about religion in America,” and the volume succeeds in that task in several ways.4 First, the contributors employ and imply organizing motifs that allow us to notice the movement of people, things, and practices up and down the Mississippi—and not just the settlements along the bank. Second, those kinetic themes are especially helpful in emphasizing the valley’s heterogeneity: an exceptionally diverse cast of characters enters these stories. As Jon Sensbach notes, the Mississippi was a site that witnessed the “confluence” of many cultures and religions, and his focus on the “Black Atlantic,” for example, brings Muslims into the story. The diversity of “sovereign Indian nations,” a point emphasized in Sylvester Johnson ’s chapter, also emerges clearly, as does the history of African American Christianity (Giggie). Especially but not only in the colonial period, Catholicism moves toward the center of the plot when narrators situate themselves in the Mississippi basin, a region once part of New France; varied Protestants receive significant attention here, too, as do the Latter-day Saints and other new religious movements (Smith, Perry). Finally, the contributors also challenge the predominant plot of “western expansion by white Protestants” by highlighting the watery boundary that divides eastern and western terrain and by reorienting the narrative in terms of a north-south axis.5 Chapters about the northern headwaters (Remillard) and Lower Mississippi (Greene, Poché, Hayes), remind us to think about locales at and beyond the U.S. border. In particular, as the contributors note that the river flows toward the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, they expand the spatial limit of the usual historical narratives. As exhilarating journeys prompt travelers to imagine their next trip, this collection of essays provokes further reflection and points to future research.6 First, by situating us along the Mississippi River, the authors provide a vantage from which to think about how to further expand the narrative’s spatial and temporal frame. Johnson maps the precolonial boundaries and considers indigenous communities that inhabited those lands, but much of the action in the stories collected here begins with European colonization. Yet at the time the Vikings sailed for the North American coast—and centuries before Columbus first crossed the Atlantic—cultures that scholars now call “Mississip- .22] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 08:34...

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